Black Web

Twitcam Makes Live Video Simpler

Video on Twitter has always been dominated by a relatively small group of services, including 12seconds, YouTube, Ustream, and Seesmic. Ustream has always been ahead of the game when it comes to broadcasting live video and integrating the discussion from Twitter. Now, Twitcam has entered the fray, looking to provide you with an easy way to mesh live video with Twitter.

Powered by Livestream, Twitcam lets you login with your Twitter account to broadcast (no oAuth support though). Just turn on your webcam and your good to go. It also saves your broadcasts for later, providing each recording with a unique URL. At this point, there are no vanity URL’s, though. Once you’ve gone live, Twitcam posts the link to your new show to your Twitter stream.

The discussion aspect will seem familiar if you’ve ever used Ustream, Livestream, or Justin.tv. You can chat with viewers via Twitter right from the broadcast screen. Each tweet posted from the interface will include a link back to your broadcast. This can help your videos reach a much larger audience and possibly go viral depending on your initial reach on Twitter.

You might be wondering what Twitcam has to offer that existing services don’t. Live streaming video isn’t all that hard to do even if you’re not tech savvy, but it’s not really as simple as it could be. This is why Tinychat has been gaining popularity. Simplicity. Nobody really wants to navigate a detailed sign-up and setup process in order to start streaming video. We just want to hit a few buttons go.

Twitcam doesn’t have many features at this point, but it’s still a young service and I suspect that will change in the near future. For now, I think we may see a lot more people dipping there toes into the live video pool on Twitter. Twitcam was actually built in a week using the Livestream API, so it’s possible we may see similar video-related Twitter tools popping up.

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